balance between operation of services and development of innovative ones, and sustainability of the services

A common or interoperable identity scheme for all e-Infrastructure providers should be developed, compatible with eduGain and possibly other schemes such as the e-Government IDs (e-IDs).

User communities

Drive the long term strategy for their e-Infrastructure needs.

Participate in the innovation of e-Infrastructure services.

Contribute to standards and take care of your data!

National governments/funding agencies

The e-IRG recommends strongly, that e-infrastructure coordination and consolidation on the national level is embraced in full force in every European country. A strong European e-infrastructure is dependent on strong national building blocks.

European Commission

e-IRG recommends that in future Work Programmes the EC provides strong incentives for cross platform innovations, thereby further supporting the need for coordination and consolidation of e-infrastructure service development and provisioning on the national and the European level.

The Overarching Working Group e-IRG (OAWG) considers the inclusion of e-Needs questions in the ESFRI very useful: they provide insight in the importance of e-infrastructure provisioning for European RIs and in particular the data management aspects. This process should be continued in the next ESFRI Roadmap exercise.

In many (European) RIs e-infrastructure requirements and in particular deploying data policies and data management activities have profound impact and could therefore also be valued as implementation issues.

The e-Needs questions need improvement: clearer, less ambiguous formulations targeting at what we want to see included in the responses, with reference to templates where relevant, such as a template for data policy and a data management plan.

It would also help if there could be a common understanding of what is meant with rating a response ‘low', ‘medium', ‘high' or very high'.

In general the level of quantification of e-infrastructure requirements was less detailed than the OAWG had expected. While quantification of e-infrastructure requirements is not a goal in itself, it does elicit an awareness of the size of the ambitions, that need to be managed in your RI.

In summary, we propose that e-IRG should work together with ESFRI to improve the e-Needs section and the assessment process also for the next roadmap, integrating the e-Needs issues even firmer in the procedure. We believe it is beneficial to e-IRG, ESFRI and the infrastructure projects that e-IRG takes part in this process. It increases our common understanding of the needs and issues of a large group of European e-infrastructure users.

More generally, policy actions should be adapted to the characteristics of Long Tail data and of their producers and users. More work is needed to understand how different building blocks can intervene to build an operational, relevant ecosystem. Some of the recommendations could be suggestions for the RDA Interest Group or other existing or possible RDA Groups.

Define and successively move towards a common data storage layer which can effectively serve requirements coming from different RIs. Also here, standardised interfaces and federative approaches should be used to include existing solutions;

Adopt a global, standardised lowest-level data infrastructure, including e.g. authorisation and authentication and persistent data identifiers; Ensure that quality of the e-Infrastructure services and the data security is delivered at a level which is relevant for the data at hand;

Pay attention to the sustainability of your data, also after the end of the project.

Summary of policy recommendations from the e-IRG Blue Paper on Data Management

As a fundament for RIs, sustainable e-Infrastructure services for enabling access to, storing, preserving and curating large amounts of data need to be in place. Policy makers are recommended to take action to ensure that

Roles (e.g. end users, data owners, infrastructure providers, service providers, and researchers on data management) are identified and, when appropriate, partitioned between different actors to ensure effective and cost-efficient solutions, fulfilling the needs of the end users and data owners.

Governance and mandates for different actors are clarified and their way of interacting is sufficiently formalised. Actors specializing on different tasks ensures that synergies can be exploited, leading to cost-efficient implementation of services. Clear responsibilities and formalised relations ensure that the relevant quality of services can be maintained. Funding paths are defined and sustainability for all parts of the e-Infrastructure is secured.

Costs for different services and procedures are made transparent and that different options for implementing them are investigated.

Also, to ensure that data will be available across borders and disciplinary domains, RIs and e-infrastructure providers are recommended to take appropriate steps to

Ensure that data formats are standardised and contain sufficient information on the data (metadata) to enable global usage within the discipline, across disciplines, and in new research settings that could possibly not be envisaged at the time of creation of the data.

Build e-infrastructure solutions consisting of multiple layers, successively adding more specialised higher-level services using standardised interfaces. Here, different layers can be provided by different actors.

Adopt a global, standardised lowest-level data infrastructure layer, including e.g. authorisation and authentication and persistent data identifiers. Here, federative approaches could be used to include existing solutions.

Define and successively move towards a common second-level data storage layer where cross-related requirements between different RIs are identified and utilised to enhance cost-efficiency and quality. Also here, standardised interfaces and federative approaches should be used to include existing solutions.

Ensure that quality of the e-infrastructure services and the data security is delivered at a level which is relevant for the data at hand.

International user communities requiring e-Infrastructure services should organize themselves to be able to address the challenges in their future roles:

Driving the long term strategy for their e-Infrastructure needs

Using their purchasing power to stimulate the development of suitable, effective e-Infrastructure services;

Participating in the innovation of e-Infrastructure services;

Contributing to standards.

International organizations of e-Infrastructures should join forces and share their common challenges towards serving the European user communities, thereby avoiding duplication of efforts (as far as possible) in such areas as:

Outreach to and involvement of user communities;

Services registry, discovery and provisioning;

Financial, legal, business development and procurement issues

These organisations should establish a clear separation between responsibilities for strategy setting and community building, operations, and innovation. Working with the user communities, they should strive to establish the e-Infrastructure umbrella forum for strategy setting in Europe, with sufficient user participation for community building, high-level strategy and coordination for the entire e-Infrastructure, with -again- a clear separation from operational responsibilities.

National governments should:

Provide a basic funding level for their national e-Infrastructure, in particular devoted to its continuous innovation;

Empower and fund their national user communities for the use of e-Infrastructure services, enabling them to influence the development of the national e-Infrastructure;

Remove existing national regulatory or political constraints for accessing publicly funded e-Infrastructures for private research and public-private research ventures;

Provide input for the strategy setting and coordination bodies for their national e-Infrastructures;

Encourage the actors in their national e-Infrastructures to collaborate and join forces with their counterparts in other countries and at EU level, along the lines described above.

The EU should strengthen the actions of the national governments by:

Establishing a European harmonised framework for the funding of e-Infrastructure innovation;

Encouraging a sustainable e-Infrastructure offering in Europe through innovation programs such as Horizon 2020, using conditions designed to encourage multiple innovation efforts by different consortia;

Empowering and funding European user communities, such as the ESFRI projects, to influence the development and use of transnational access to the e-Infrastructure;

Enabling and promoting the use of Structural Funds for e-Infrastructure development in less favoured areas;

Providing input for the European strategy setting and coordination bodies and their umbrella forum;

Striving towards harmonisation so that regulatory conflicts can be avoided, both at the national and at the international level, with existing regulations for (among others) state aid or competition rules;

Providing clear guidelines for ‘regulation proof' participation of private research in the use of e-Infrastructure services.

Existing e-Infrastructure Service Providers will have to face the continuous challenge of service development and operation, funded through public schemes in the early and precompetitive phases, and through user fees thereafter.

Recommendation 1/5 - Governments and the Commission should develop policies and mechanisms to encourage increased investment in a more coherent and interoperable way across Europe

Recommendation 2/5 - The existing e-Infrastructure projects must be superseded by integrated sustainable services at national and European levels

Recommendation 3/5 - e-Infrastructures must be application-neutral and open to all user communities and resource providers. National funding agencies should be encouraged to fund multi-disciplinary and inclusive infrastructures rather than disciplinary-specific alternatives

Recommendation 4/5 - e-Infrastructures must inter-operate and adopt international standard services and protocols in order to qualify for funding

Recommendation 5/5 - The Commission should, within the seventh Framework Programme, develop a pan-European e-Infrastructure which explicitly encourages the further integration of national e- Infrastructure initiatives

Recommendation 1/18 - The European Research Area should clearly be seen to embrace Innovation – articulated in the context of this meeting through the name European Research and Innovation Area (ERIA)

Recommendation 2/18 - The strong level of interest in the meeting indicates how e-Infrastructures are vital for the attainment of the vision of eEurope and ERA.

Recommendation 3/18 - It is clear that many countries are joining together into regions and this was presented as a powerful tool for cooperation. An EU-wide infrastructure could grow from these regions.

Recommendation 4/18 - e-Infrastructures will only succeed if we solve end-to-end issues at the technical, infrastructural, methodological and social/human levels.

Recommendation 5/18 - GEANT is a major achievement and may show the way forward in terms of building production Grids and a real eInfrastructure throughout Europe.

Recommendation 6/18 - Solving the challenges of authorisation, authentication and accounting are key challenges for all Grid projects – this is a major hurdle in the context of building an e-Infrastructure for Europe.

Recommendation 7/18 - The trust model has to be developed further in order to share not just bandwidth but also computing resources. Grids must take the lead in helping with this process.

Recommendation 8/18 - The next steps for the Grid must be to move to reliable, resilient, and robust production quality middleware.

Recommendation 9/18 - We should continue to focus on Open Standards and avoid any vendor lock-in.

Recommendation 10/18 - The idea of an Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute for Europe was broadly supported - the rationale behind this being to create the next generation of production quality software from the developments that have taken place to date.

Recommendation 11/18 - Key to the general uptake of Grids and the creation of a real e-Infrastructure for Europe will be the transition from e-Science -> e-Business -> e-Society

Recommendation 12/18 - We must identify the next generation of applications – the so called "killer apps" – and improve our promotion of the benefits that e-Infrastructures will bring to their user communities.

Recommendation 13/18 - To build e-Infrastructures we need to focus on middleware interoperability and the accompanying policy decisions required to make our software and operating paradigms interoperable in a global context.

Recommendation 14/18 - Policy issues – particularly in a local context need to be addressed. Only by addressing the intricacies of local policy issues will be able to make local resources available in Grids.

Recommendation 15/18 - We will build e-Infrastructures by focusing on policy issues related to resource sharing in the context of the European Research Area. Such discussions must take place at an intergovernmental level.

Recommendation 16/18 - The overall recommendation from this meeting is that an e-Infrastructures Reflection Group, built from National Programme representatives, should be established and perhaps advise the Governmental representatives who sit in existing committees.

Recommendation 17/18 - The e-Infrastructures Reflection Group should consider and communicate clear messages on e-Infrastructure Policy issues to both the European Commission and existing e-Infrastructure projects on policy matters

Recommendation 18/18 - A troika of the current presidency of the EU (Greek) and the two following ones (Italy and Ireland) should discuss further what needs to be achieved with regard to moving this debate forward.